here's a #witch question for the fediverse...anyone else here ever tried to use chat (IRC, Discorrd, whatever) for specific ritual purpose?
@kara_dreamer ◽ We held an entire ceremony on a MUCK about a month ago, FWIW, but I'm not sure that counts. ◾ What are you counting as “chat”—any realtime text medium, or does it have to be primarily speech-like?
@chalcedony I think that very much counts! and I was going with chat in the text sense; I feel that I can be freer if I type, while doing things aloud tends to cause me trouble. I feel like my text-to-speech filtering is laggard and has a lot of inhibitions attached, hence my interest in "virtual ritual"
@kara_dreamer ◾ The way we ran it involved us having about five or six MUCK connections at once, since we're plural, but more importantly, one or two of them were dedicated to “being the world”, since we were holding it in what amounted to a somewhat abstracted mirror of part of our inner space.
That's why I asked about “speech-like”—people usually think of “chat” as a medium that's almost exclusively _dialogue_, but a text virtual world in a broader sense can be rendered as _full prose_.
@kara_dreamer ◾ “being the world”, in this case, mapping mechanically to being privileged to enter lines and paragraphs of narrative description-of-events into the streams feeding everyone's perception, without tagging them with a source avatar.
@kara_dreamer ◾ (sorry I'm getting a little babbly, by the way, I'm nearly asleep and so the cutting-things-down part of output starts cutting out a bit more)
@chalcedony good stuff though! I will have to answer at greater length when not at work. I am most fascinated, especially since I too adopt a plural personality in online interactions (though lately we've been rather far out of balance and have yet to find a new equilibrium that makes sense...for the moment it's just me and @kel uppermost.)
@kara_dreamer ◾ Our plurality isn't “adopted for online”, BTW, in case that wasn't clear; we experience it directly and persistently. (I could babble about related things for a while, but I think sleep for now; poke us later if you want to know more)
@chalcedony thanks. I'd like to clarify, but it'll wait...
@chalcedony ah, ok! :) my personality division isn't *just* an online thing, but online is where it flourishes. I've had little luck so far in vocalizing it in other ways. In conversations it's just too awkward, and even with just myself I've had strong inhibitions against speaking in alternate voices. I've done it but it's not easy or natural seeming. I suspect that I have some mother-inflicted aversion to speaking when it's not absolutely necessary.
@kara_dreamer ◽ Oh, totally. Switching physically is higher-overhead, and we don't have any real experience with marking it properly because of lack of social groups to practice against. Though fluent microtrance and some fiddling can make it obvious, or so we hear.
@chalcedony oh, yeah, there's hardly anyone I know in person around whom I feel safe to talk in plural terms. Maybe four people in Seattle, tops. I suspect there's a bit more switching going on than is immediately apparent, though. like if I'm talking and then suddenly feel like interjecting a line from a song or a quote from a film, that's Kel breaking into things.
@kara_dreamer ◾ Connecting this to the earlier track—our personality-line has been strongly adapted to text-VR for generations/decades. To the point that the part of us that handles interconversion between experiential and streaming-prose channels is subconscious and has its own, separate, function-constrained, high-privilege context to operate in.
@kara_dreamer ◽ Oh? I'm curious, now that we're more awake.